2017-2018 Cohort Demographics

I finally have a complete picture of what happened this year across the cohort. Hopefully this will help inform the discussion.

First there is an overall backdrop of cohort growth.  The 9th grade cohort is beginning of the bubble with the number of kids jumping  30% in a single year.  This can make individual increases at a school look a little deceptive. Numbers were up everywhere except Ingraham which is capped because the pool increased so much.

[Note: the data below has only IHS / Garfield #s in 9-12]

[2016-2017 cohort size data]

So where do the kids originate from now?

Things vary a bit year to year but the largest two draw zones  are Roosevelt and Ballard which are more than half of the entire cohort by themselves.   The north end of  Seattle actually has half the city's population anyway but if you add it up it makes up 68% of the kids in HC cohort.  This is key: if the north end stopped feeding Garfield entirely you'd be left with a pool of around 100-140 kids per year (depending on W. Seattle). This would be a shrinkage from recent years. [I need to find the historical numbers but I think within the last 10 the program was once about this size.]

So what's happening at each school:

First oddly the number of kids actually rose in the total cohort since last year's report. There is no evidence of private school flight.

As you can see Roosevelt had a dramatic shift +43, Ballard +13 but Garfield still was up +62.  This is the root of the alarm at the district level. Although the north end is pulling more kids than initially projected this is still not a sustainable level at Garfield.

Secondly: looking at 9th grade as a whole about  22% went to Ingraham 43% to Garfield and the rest stayed in their neighborhood. The pathways as a whole remained the majority choice. In the north end in specific, the retention rate rose to about 50% which is a new trend versus the previous years.